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What happens to Trump’s criminal and civil cases now that he
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2024-11-06 07:04:28
Donald Trump has been reelected to the White House as a convicted felon who is awaiting sentencing in his hush money case in New York and still working to stave off prosecution in other state and federal cases.
It’s an extraordinarily unique position for him to be in: Never before has a criminal defendant been elected to the nation’s highest office, just as an ex-president had never been criminally charged until last year.
Trump has said multiple times he plans to fire special counsel Jack Smith and end the federal cases against him for trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election and mishandling classified documents.
“It clearly paid off to aggressively push to delay these cases as long as possible,” said Jessica Levinson, a constitutional law professor at Loyola Law School.
In the meantime, a judge in New York is set to sentence the former president later this month after holding off on handing down the punishment ahead of Election Day to avoid any appearance of affecting the outcome of the presidential race – though Trump’s lawyers are expected to ask the judge to put off the sentencing now that he’s the president-elect.
Trump has pleaded not guilty to all charges. Here’s what to know about the four criminal cases:
New York sentencing
Trump is scheduled to appear in a New York courtroom on November 26 to receive a sentence for his conviction earlier this year on 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up a hush money payment made during the 2016 campaign to adult-film star Stormy Daniels, who alleged a prior affair with the president-elect. (Trump denies the affair.)
Whether that sentencing happens at all remains an open question.
Judge Juan Merchan has given himself a November 12 deadline to decide whether to wipe away the conviction because of the Supreme Court’s decision this summer granting a president some presidential immunity. If Merchan does that, the charges would be dismissed, and he would not be sentenced.
But if the judge decides to keep the conviction intact, the former president’s lawyers are expected to ask Merchan to delay Trump’s sentencing so they can appeal. And if that’s not granted, his attorneys are planning to appeal the immunity decision to state appellate courts and potentially all the way to the US Supreme Court to ask the courts to delay Trump’s sentencing until all appeals are exhausted, which could take months.
Should Merchan move ahead with sentencing, Trump could be ordered to serve as much as four years of prison time, but the judge is not required to sentence the president-elect to prison, and he could impose a lesser sentence, such as probation, home confinement, community service or a fine.
Any sentence, of course, will be complicated by the fact that Trump is set to take office on January 20, 2025. Trump’s lawyers are likely to shape their appeals to raise constitutional issues challenging whether a state judge can sentence a president-elect, which could tie the case up in courts for years.
Since it is a state case, Trump does not have the power to pardon himself next year after he is sworn into office.
Federal cases in DC and Florida
Trump’s election victory is poised to have the greatest impact on the two federal criminal cases brought against him by Smith in Washington, DC, and Florida.
Since the cases were brought in 2023, Trump’s main legal strategy in them has been to delay the trials until past the election so that, if elected, he could fire Smith, leading to the end of the two cases. In late October, the former president said he would take such a step without hesitation.
“Oh, it’s so easy. It’s so easy,” Trump said when asked by conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt whether he would “pardon yourself” or “fire Jack Smith” if reelected.
“I would fire him within two seconds,” Trump said.
Dismissing Smith would allow the Department of Justice and Trump’s attorney general to move to drop the charges against him and end the court cases.
But until Inauguration Day on January 20, Smith has time to weigh his options on issues the department has never had to confront before.
One early hurdle is whether the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel considers a president-elect to be covered by the same legal protection against prosecution as a sitting president. That guidance would determine the next course of action, people briefed on the matter told CNN.
More than a half dozen people who are close to the special counsel’s office or other top Justice Department officials told CNN that they believe Smith doesn’t want to close shop before being ordered to do so or being pushed out by Trump.
Under federal law, Smith must provide a confidential report on his office’s work to the attorney general before he leaves the post.
In the DC case, Smith charged Trump over his efforts to overturn his election loss in 2020. The case was stalled for months as Trump pressed federal courts to grant him presidential immunity, and in July the Supreme Court issued a historic ruling that said he had some immunity from criminal prosecution.
The federal judge overseeing the trial has been deciding how much of Trump’s conduct at the center of the case is shielded by immunity after prosecutors last month laid out their arguments for why the ruling should have no impact on the case.
The charges brought by Smith against the president-elect in Florida accuse Trump of illegally taking classified documents from the White House and resisting the government’s attempts to retrieve the materials. That case was thrown out in July by Judge Aileen Cannon, but prosecutors have appealed her ruling, which said that Attorney General Merrick Garland’s appointment of Smith violated the Constitution.
Georgia RICO case
The immediate fate of Trump’s criminal case in Georgia largely hinges on whether Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, a Democrat, is disqualified from prosecuting the matter after her prior romantic relationship with a fellow prosecutor. But even if she is allowed to continue prosecuting Trump, the case would almost certainly imperiled now that he has been elected.
The criminal charges again Trump for attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election results are effectively on hold while the appeals court decides whether to disqualify Willis, a decision that is not expected until 2025.
If Willis is removed, sources told CNN they think it’s unlikely another prosecutor will want to take up the case and it will effectively go away.
Sources familiar with the case said it is unlikely that a state-level judge would allow proceedings to continue when Trump is president and, in that scenario, Trump’s attorneys would certainly move to have the case dismissed.
There is no clear answer as to whether a state-level prosecutor, like Willis, can prosecute a sitting president. Trump’s victory now forces Willis to confront that constitutional question in addition to the existing legal issues that have already cast uncertainly over the Georgia case’s future.
Civil suits
The former president is also defending himself in a litany of civil lawsuits, including ones concerning his role in the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, two E. Jean Carroll defamation cases, and a civil fraud case brought by the New York attorney general where Trump was ordered to pay nearly $454 million in .
In September, state and federal appeals courts in New York heard arguments for two of Trump’s civil appeals.
Trump lost two defamation cases to Carroll in 2023 and 2024 in federal court after a jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing the onetime columnist and subsequently defaming her. Two juries awarded Carroll $5 million and $83 million.
A federal appeals court heard Trump’s appeal to dismiss the first Carroll verdict in September. The court has yet to issue a decision.
Later in the month, a state appeals court heard arguments in Trump’s efforts to dismiss the $454 million civil fraud judgement against him, in which a judge found he, his adult sons and his company fraudulently inflated the value of Trump’s assets to obtain better loan and insurance rates.
The five-judge appeals court appeared open to at least lowering the fine levied against Trump, though it also has yet to issue a decision. That ruling can be appealed to New York’s highest appellate court.
Trump is also still facing civil lawsuits brought by Democratic lawmakers and others over his role in the January 6 Capitol attack.
It’s possible that all these cases continue to play out even as Trump serves his second term in the White House. In a 1997 Supreme Court ruling stemming from a civil lawsuit then-President Bill Clinton was involved in, the justices unanimously decided that sitting presidents could not invoke presidential immunity to avoid civil litigation while in office.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/06/politics/what-happens-to-trump-criminal-cases/index.html
Say goodbye to Trump’s legal cases
The criminal candidate will now effectively be his own judge and jury.
Donald Trump didn’t just beat Kamala Harris. He beat the system that tried to put him in jail.
He was already the first former president ever to be charged with and convicted of felonies. Now he has become the first convicted felon ever to win a presidential election. And his victory virtually guarantees that he will never face serious legal accountability for an avalanche of alleged wrongdoing.
Trump’s imminent return to the White House shatters years of work by special counsel Jack Smith to convict Trump for his attempt to subvert the 2020 election and for the stockpile of classified documents he kept at his Florida estate.
It halts the prosecution he is facing in Georgia for his 2020 election plot as well.
It almost certainly allows Trump to postpone any sentence on his New York conviction for covering up a hush money scheme in 2016.
In short, the president-elect is now his own judge and jury, insulated from the criminal consequences he might have faced without the legal force field of the Oval Office.
Even the civil cases against him will now face new obstacles. Presidents can, in some circumstances, be subject to civil penalties from private lawsuits, but Trump will surely try to use the cloak of the presidency to avoid paying the hundreds of millions of dollars he owes in judgments for sexual abuse, defamation and corporate fraud.
Here’s how it all unravels.
Firing Jack Smith
Trump has vowed to end Smith’s tenure “within two seconds” if the special counsel hasn’t already vacated his post by Inauguration Day. And whoever Trump installs to run the Justice Department will have the power to formally drop all federal charges against Trump.
That means Smith is suddenly facing a two-and-a-half-month countdown to the demise of the two cases he has been building since November 2022.
Smith’s final moves are uncertain. Could he unveil long-dormant charges against some of Trump’s alleged co-conspirators, only for Trump to pardon them as soon as he takes office? Could he release a final report that unfurls previously secret evidence that would have come out in a trial? Will he continue operating through Inauguration Day and force Trump’s new Justice Department leaders to oust him?
For the immediate future, Smith’s cases remain pending. In Washington, where Trump faces four felony counts for conspiring to steal another term four years ago, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan has set a series of filing deadlines in November and December. Expect Trump’s attorneys to ask Chutkan to call off those deadlines given Trump’s imminent ascent to the White House.
In Florida, where Trump was charged with 40 felony counts for hoarding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago and obstructing the government’s attempt to retrieve them, the case has already been tangled up in a protracted appeal. U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the case on the ground that Attorney General Merrick Garland had no authority to appoint Smith in the first place. Smith has asked an appeals court to reinstate the case, but the appeal is unlikely to advance before Trump retakes the White House.
Fani Willis’ fizzle
No case against Trump has been more of a muddle than the one Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis brought in August 2023. Like Smith, Willis charged Trump with attempting to subvert the 2020 election, in part by conspiring to corrupt Georgia’s certification process.
But Willis’ case has been sidelined for months after she was accused of having a financial conflict of interest stemming from her romantic relationship with a prosecutor she hired to run the case. Judge Scott McAfee denied a bid to disqualify Willis and the rest of her office from the case. But Trump appealed that ruling, freezing all proceedings for months.
Now, the outcome of that appeal is almost beside the point. Even if Willis wins the right to resume the case, Trump will seek to have the charges tossed out or, failing that, put on hold for the duration of his presidency. He will have a strong argument: Presidents have long been understood to have broad immunity from prosecution while they are in office. And many legal experts, citing the principle that national interests prevail over state interests, believe the courts will never allow a state-level prosecutor like Willis to pursue criminal charges against a sitting president.
Even if Willis — or some future Fulton County DA — tries to revive the case in 2029, after Trump leaves office, it will be extraordinarily difficult to prosecute a case nearly a decade after the events that gave rise to the charges.
A dilemma for Juan Merchan
In the one case where Trump has already been found guilty, his electoral victory means he likely can defer any punishment.
Justice Juan Merchan, who oversaw the Manhattan criminal trial this spring that ended in Trump’s conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels, is scheduled to sentence Trump on Nov. 26. But the president-elect’s lawyers, who have already successfully delayed the sentencing twice, are certain to argue against hauling him into a state courtroom in the middle of his presidential transition. Also pending before Merchan is a request from Trump that the guilty verdict be set aside in light of the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity.
Should Merchan proceed with the sentencing as scheduled, he’ll face the unprecedented task of deciding whether to impose a prison sentence of up to four years on a defendant who is set to occupy the White House come January. If he does order Trump to prison, Trump almost certainly won’t be required to serve that sentence until after he leaves office in 2029.
And even if Merchan opts for a punishment without a prison term — home confinement, say, or community service — Trump’s lawyers will likely seek to delay those, too, arguing that logistical challenges and constitutional duties should preclude a president-elect, or a sitting president, from having to carry out any sentence.
The civil cases
Beyond his criminal cases, Trump was also hit with three civil judgments over the past 18 months, and a fourth serious civil case is pending against him. He is expected to use his return to the presidency to try to stave off the acute financial consequences of these lawsuits — which amount to more than a half billion dollars in liability.
Unlike the bar on prosecuting a sitting president, there is no prohibition against collecting private civil damages from the occupant of the White House. In fact, Trump himself was forced to pay $2 million during his first presidential term after a judge imposed the penalty as part of a settlement over the misuse of Trump Foundation funds. But with far greater sums of money at stake in his current civil cases, Trump could argue that proceeding with the lawsuits would interfere with his ability to execute his duties.
And he could use the power of the presidency to pressure the plaintiffs who have sued him. He has, for instance, threatened to exact retribution against New York Attorney General Letitia James, who won the largest of the civil judgments against Trump. James, Trump declared last year, “should be prosecuted!”
Here’s a rundown of the civil cases:
The fraud case. In the case brought by James, a Manhattan trial judge imposed penalties of more than $450 million on Trump for fraudulently inflating his net worth and the value of his real estate properties to obtain favorable rates from banks and insurers.
Trump is appealing that verdict and is awaiting the decision of an appeals court panel that heard oral arguments in September.
The Carroll cases. Trump also owes $88 million for two judgments that the writer E. Jean Carroll won against him. Federal juries in New York found that Trump sexually abused Carroll in a department store dressing room in the 1990s and then defamed her decades later when she went public with her story.
Trump has appealed both verdicts.
The Jan. 6 case. Another source of potential civil liability stems from Trump’s role in stoking the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Police officers who were injured by the mob and members of Congress who fled in fear have sued Trump for damages, alleging that he bears legal responsibility for the violence.
Trump lost a protracted bid to throw the case out on immunity grounds, but there are still complicated questions arising from his status as president at the time that the courts must resolve. The case is still likely months or even years away from resolution. Now, Trump may have the power to grind litigation to a halt for the duration of his presidency.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/11/06/trump-win-what-next-legal-cases-00187635
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